RE: Hosting of the cookbook

On 2004-04-14 17:42:54 +0100 Anton van Straaten 
<[email protected]> wrote:

> We'll always have the option of selectively freezing pages, which Noel
> mentioned, and I think we'll probably reach a point where we want to 
> use
> that.

I still favour page-including-annotations as a "middle way" to avoid 
using both these extremes (open zoo and totally frozen).

>> Have we any data to favour the assumption of "iterative revision
>> will improve not decrease quality" over "some contributors will
>> goof sometimes"? [...]
> No, we don't have any data.  However, I think we could easily collect 
> some,
> by starting out as open as possible.

OK, sounds like an interesting research. What's the data collection 
plan? How do we judge quality? Ask people to "rate this page" and see 
how it changes over time? Are there other measures we could use?

> The argument as I see it is that at least some of our contributors are
> likely to be responsible, and save the editors some work, as opposed 
> to
> knowing for sure that every contribution has to be edited to 
> integrate it.

Not really. I think we can safely assume that every page will need 
some editing. If the editor has some control over how new changes are 
integrated, then the editing can be split up into small pieces over a 
long time. If it's totally unrestricted, then there will need to be 
more drastic detangling at regular intervals, unless a large 
proportion of our contributors are good editors (which seems unlikely, 
to be honest... even gifted authors have editors).

> The question is whether other, less ideal contributors will completely
> offset this, or not.  I think this can partially be addressed by 
> having some
> guidelines about editing existing content.

That would surely help. A lot of things are going by on the list and I 
don't know which are still relevant.

-- 
MJR/slef     My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
Please http://remember.to/edit_messages on lists to be sure I read
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ gopher://g.towers.org.uk/ [email protected]
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